by Laurent Demarta
The topic in question is “sustainable cities” and I will approach it here with the point of view of the town planner. The two primary questions that arise are “Are cities sustainable?” and “Which cities are we talking about?”. The combination of both these questions leads to the definition of the final question: “Which cities could leave room for sustainability?”
The disappearance of the cities
“City” is a common word used flippantly. But what reality is hidden under this term? What is a city fundamentally? We start with the first of our primary questions.
Which cities are we talking about? The word “city” brings to mind many an image: gothic porches, stone skyscrapers of the early 20th century, squares in the shadow of the train station of the 19th, and so on. But the commonplace image of cities in our cultures always includes remains of great pastimes: small streets unsuitable for cars, hidden bookstores with shabby glass fronts, dark stone and tired wood bent by the weight of time. One thinks of getting lost in the labyrinth of stairs and cobble-stones, and suddenly facing a romantic tower or a massive keep, remains of times of terror.
This is the traditional centre of almost any European city. Although it is a singularity and not the general image of contemporary cities, it is the strongest image, since it relates to history and symbols. To make it short, let’s call this the imaged city, the picture one has in mind, however far from any reality. This image is made of Tour Eiffel, Skylines, White operas reflecting in a bay and lonely romantic towers.
Apart from it, there is the idealized city, sometimes partly realised such as in the case of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux. This is the idealisation of what a city “should” be according to a culture. These idealised cities, dreamt or built, are always chimeras, and can only be lived in by perverting their perfection. There is a clash between idealized cities and lived cities.
The term urbanization was born with Idefonso Cerdá’s plan of (built) Barcelona (1867). In Cerda’s writings, the first occurrence of the Spanish “Urbanización” (town planning) replaces “Ensanje” (extension) previously used – new term, new reality. With planned cities, dream meets reality of life. The goal shifts from drawing a city (a finished object) to control its growth, from frozen ideal to moving reality. The next step was achieved with the CIAM 1953 (international congress of modern architecture) about “metropolisation”: cities were theorised. Functions have been identified, and all the tools for a science with the city as an object were established. Now, all these definitions of cities mix up and melt when one thinks of “city”: emphasized symbols, idealised shape, where planned intervention of various times cope together for better and for worse, and beside these images, one thinks now in terms of flux, centres, function, and so on. Which of these cites are we talking about?
The cities are dead Besides this complex idea of a city, let’s ask the question ‘what is a city’? Our cities were born in the Thirteenth Century, with what Georges Duby calls the “urban revolution”. What one nowadays calls “city” is the product of the mixture of middle-ages core, with Renaissance interventions and spreading, and with a huge digging in due to Nineteenth Century modernism. This is a city one can quite easily picture. But this city doesn’t exist anymore, save in our brains, as an image. The twentieth century brought up the end of the cities. Cities needed to be opposed to countryside. The massive spreading around of our cities overwhelmed the rural in-between, so that we live now in the continuous net of a “global city”. “Cities” was a term related to a world where “centres” could be opposed to “sides”, as “day” can be opposed to “night”. With the significant rate of 50% of human beings living in cities, Twentieth Century saw the victory of “urbs” over “cities”: linking, speed, net-thinking, up to zapping built the chaos we live in, that no one can call a “city” any-more. Some theorizers such as Andrez Corboz propose the term of “hypercity”, in reference to computing “hypertexts”. Other thinkers, other terms, but this is not our purpose here. We only need to witness what all agree on: “cities” are dead. Space is now structureless, and our brains are fooled, unable to think the chaos, such as we cannot easily conceive time out of the rhythm of nights and days. We’ve lost our landmarks with the withdrawal of the cities.
So, what was the subject about? “Sustainable cities”? That’s quite a trick, when all the thinkers of a generation agree on the fact there are no cities anymore! So, if we think of “sustainable dwelling”, the question is rather one of architecture; and quite far from our purpose. If we think of “sustainable city-centres”, the question is only related to a symbol, a monument. No point talking of sustainability with such pieces of art. If the question was: “sustainable infrastructures”, it turns to be very technical, easy to “solve” with basic cause-to-consequence thinking. Are we talking of communications? Of industry? Of services? Of shape? Of size? And before all, from where are these cities that we are talking about: an industrialized metropolis of a developed country, or a huge miserable megapolis of a developing country?
The path our cities are heading on is a cul-de-sac
Whatever their definition can be, cities are monsters. It’s long ago town planners gave up controlling them. They now grow on their own, with their own internal logics and towards self-determined aims. Urbanism was dead with the death of the cities. Cities have always been seen as the place of freedom. Whereas middles-ages knowledge were kept alive hidden in remote monks communities, cities claimed it out so it could enlighten the whole humanity as the freedom’s flame. But as with a flame, cities have always attracted both the poorest of a country, in search of some remains to live on, and the brightest minds, longing for pairs. Cities were a place of highest contrasts, whereas countryside was a place of aver-age and balance. Among others, Georg Simmel lit up this “tragedy”: on one side, cities are the place of movement, of ever-changing, of mode, and at the end of the day, of freedom. But because of the restlessness of these very characteristics, cities are on the other side the place of rootlessness, superficiality, and vanity, up to selfishness. He already noticed that more communication diminished genuine friendship, as later thinkers realized that the function of circulating over-whelmed the subject of the person in movement. Big cities are like a spider on its web. They suck out the lively blood of a whole piece of land and digest it to its own benefits defined as speed, ever-changing, ever-increasing, and spreading out limitlessly. Shapeless chaotic cities are impressive, fascinating, and devour with infinite voracity the human beings cough in her net. If the image can be counted as too strong, it is not wrong though. Big cities cannot live of their own life. They need to be sustained (fed) from the outside. But we’ll come again to this later on. Now, let’s say a big city concentrates the wealth of a territory, just as pastimes court of kings concentrated the wealth of a country: who asks whether king-ship is sustainable or not? What is the point talking of the head ignoring the body? When the court weights too much for the people, there’s a revolution. When the spider is too heavy for its trap, it breaks; and when Roma grew one million inhabitants, the whole empire that had to support it collapsed, as described by Jacques Neirinck. Such scheme is repeated nowadays in developing countries.
We can now give first-stage answers to our beginning questions. Are cities sustainable? The answer is obviously no! One cannot consider a phenomenon without taking into ac-count all what sustains it. Cities cannot be thought of excluding its resources. But this does not mean cities are “bad” because unbalanced. Life requires things to be slightly unbalanced, in or-der to move from one thing to another. Natural “balance” is dynamic. Only a dead world is perfectly balanced. So what is the problem? When the difference is impossible to take over any more, the system breaks. This is now at our doorstep. To the questions What cities are we talking of?, the answer is: “what is the most sustainable use of the space we have to man-age?” Or: “What is the alternative to big cities?”
Some sketches and tries
If the twentieth century has seen the collapse of the traditional cities, it has also seen the reactions and tries out the foreseeable cul-de-sac. Let’s mention briefly four.
Ebenezer Howard’s Garden-cities After a book published in 1898, Howard had the opportunity to apply his program by building the new city of Letchworth (UK) in 1903, and a couple others after this one. Amusingly enough, Howard’s Garden-cities are not what one could thinks hearing “garden”: they included agriculture, of course, but also industry. Actually, such a Garden-city is meant to be almost self-sufficient. This is indeed worth studying, when the general topic is “sustainability”. Garden-cities were a try to mix cities and countryside, being neither. That is indeed to be further studied at the time of “hypercity”! Garden-cities were self-governed, politically independent, and property was abolished. The archi-tecture was new, with rational use of material and local resources (almost the program of sustainable architecture!). Howard also had some tries on collective houses erected around an inner court. But of this, we will talk further. All to be said now is that Howard’s Garden-cities were a success in their time, but failed as a program with WW1. Nev-ertheless, towns such as Letchworth are still very neat places where living is convenient and agreeable.
“Red Vienna” (Otto Wagner) Shortly later, it was the time for socialism to ride for his try. The Socio-democrat party won the elections in Vi-enna right out WW1. Otto Wagner was promoted “chief architect” of the land (the very city was one of the country’s “Länder”, with independent parliament and tax system) with a program of thousands of flats to be built for the refugees of the war: between 1923 and 1934, 64’000 apartments have been built. It was paid on taxes on existing buildings (“tax the landlords”), and prices were related to earnings rather than surface. Physically, the system was organized with courts (“Höfe”) of graduating intimacy surrounded with multi-storey buildings. The actual flat was only meant for eating and sleeping, when social life stood in the courts, with an amazing success. Common “party halls” were shared on the terrace roofs. The massive plebiscite of the project ended out bloodily the first of May 1933, when the conservative parties came back to power.
Ernst May (Frankfurt) In the same stream, Ernst May erected 12’000 flats in five years in Frankfurt, in the twenties. Even though the outlook was massively cheap and modern, it has been very well accepted, and nowadays, people still appreciate as an honour living in Ernst May’s towns. Among the reasons of such a success, let’s mention the fact that the buildings were partly self-built (under control of the architect), that the rate was cheap (maintained below the third of a low worker’s wage), that the construction was of quality even though without ornament, and overall that Ernst May was a master in urbanism. He thought of sunlight, of trees (at the right place), of privacy and social life, of closing perspectives, and of bringing in fantasy in the volumes of the street space, following Camilio Sitte.
Rottier and Co After WW2, cheap was the only motto, forgetting all the social ideas of the previous builders, and all what has been built then is either about to be demolished, either turned to a ghetto of some kind. The only contemporary men-tions of “alternative ways of life” i can think of is proposed by Guy Rottier and his friends (their group is called “Con-spiratifs”). Far from the great social experiences of the other end of the century, they experienced new ways of dwell-ing. For instance, Jacques Rougerie explored the possibilities of living undersea, and Thierry Valfort the reusing materi-als.
On shape and size
What is the common thread in those experiences? With the exclusion of the latest, more related to architecture, they all talk about density. If we nowadays raise the question of sustainable architecture, the first picture to usually come up is a house in a garden with a wide greenhouse aside, and solar shields tiling the pitched roof southwards. Nice indeed, but how about multiplying this beautiful dream? There is a famous drawing by Le Corbusier made of two pictures. On the first one, there is a house along a road, surrounded with woods; the legend is “a dream”. The second one shows the same piece of landscape covered with a hundred of the same house, the legend being “a dream multiplied by one million”. “Green” houses are nice, but they can only be an exception. There’s no way such a model could be multiplied by us all. Furthermore, what is “ecological” in such house if it needs to be related to a whole bunch of services, beginning with power, and ending with roads, through various communication systems? The “house”-type is among the most unsustainable systems, since it requires the spreading of an awful lot of supporting systems. Again. Only talking of transportations: most ecologists agree on the fact that public transportation is to be promoted. But little realize that to be efficient (socially, economically and energetically), public transportation need a critical amount of people. Spread sub-urbs are unlikely to be covered with a public transportation system. Public transportation requires density. And energy production and distribution require density. And water collection and treatment require density. And efficient commu-nication requires density. The common dream of a cosy detached house has to be fought against by any who pretends himself an ecologist.
Here is the crux of the whole talk. On the one hand, sustainability requires concentration, whereas on the other hand, it claims cities are not sustainable. There’s an urge for an escape here, there’s a need of another type of cities, such as those mentioned previously.
The art of living
All these alternative systems held a strong social aspect. It is of highest importance to understand that the overwhelming power of cities is nothing to be fought against. This power is not a cause, it is a consequence. The unliveable, if not unsustainable, “Big city” is the very product of a system of values: as long as speed, production, accumulation and fame will be held as goals, hidden or shown, Big Cities will spread out uncontrolled, up to the breaking point. Only a changing of values can cut the Gordian Knot we’re currently stuck in. There’s an urge for thinking, talking, teaching, and maybe advertising.
The socialist idea, which brought up “Red Vienna” has been mentioned. Let’s now seize the other end of the string, and think of the individual level, according to that a society’s aims are related to the individual ones. The first thing we want to make clear is that there is no point in kind of a “punishment-oriented” way of thinking. Sustainability is nothing connected to a list of limits one has to respect in order to get to Paradise or to be allowed living in the peace of one’s mind. There’s no sustainability in Puritanism, may this be claimed out loud and repeated as long as needed.
Let’s stick to our question of living, in order not to get lost in general talks on sustainability. We cannot vacuum the dream of a detached house without proposing another dream, as likely to be dreamed of as the previous one was. So, what do we have to propose?
We’ll propose one word: “dwelling”. It’s a long time we have been pulled of the notion of dwelling. Dwelling re-lates to time, which is the opposite of speed (the more speed, the less time: everything is related). Dwelling relates to appropriation, which is the straight opposite of possessing (the more I own, the less I enjoy). On these topics, please refer to Georg Simmel, Stéphan Jonas and Jean-Jacques Rousseau; and, overall, the tragically misunderstood Epicure.
Martin Heidegger is the one who set up the theory of the notion of dwelling, related to the Latin word “Habitare” (“use”, or “stay”). He has been relayed in the specific aspects of urbanism and architecture by Christian Norberg-Schultz, who proposed the notion of “Ort” (“place”, “spot”). An “Ort” is the connexion between space and being. Such an “Ort” is a place where the here-and-now (“da sein”) is promoted. This is the great challenge and the high task of architects and town planners: building an “Ort” where only space stood. To make it clearer, i will mention two example of what meant here: firstly the commonplace bench-under-the-tree in the central place of any village. Secondly, the stairs up the “Grande Arche” in La Défense (Paris). “Something” happens there; and the thinkers’ greatest modesty is not to try to define what, precisely. Making an “Ort” is allowing the maximum of chances for “something” to happen.Martin Heidegger is the one who set up the theory of the notion of dwelling, related to the Latin word “Habitare” (“use”, or “stay”). He has been relayed in the specific aspects of urbanism and architecture by Christian Norberg-Schultz, who proposed the notion of “Ort” (“place”, “spot”). An “Ort” is the connexion between space and being. Such an “Ort” is a place where the here-and-now (“da sein”) is promoted. This is the great challenge and the high task of architects and town planners: building an “Ort” where only space stood. To make it clearer, i will mention two example of what meant here: firstly the commonplace bench-under-the-tree in the central place of any village. Secondly, the stairs up the “Grande Arche” in La Défense (Paris). “Something” happens there; and the thinkers’ greatest modesty is not to try to define what, precisely. Making an “Ort” is allowing the maximum of chances for “something” to happen.
As an assessment, let’s recall that for the planners of any kind, the goal is designing “Orts”, i.e. places one can easily appropriate; for each one of us, the goal is to relearn dwelling, i.e. appropriating things and places. As the “tam-ing” of the Little Prince’s Fox, this takes time and feelings. These are the values one has to promote to escape the devil circle of cities turning to independent monsters. And following the social movements of a century ago, there is an urge we relearn to live together.
By Laurent Demarta
EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland
P.S.
Acknowledgement: I am very thankful to my teachers DW Dreisse and Stéphan Jonas of Strasbourg’s school of architecture, and more so to Thierry Paquot, who introduced me to the relation between architecture and philosophy.
I also thank Chaitra for her help on formal aspects.
Basic Bibliography:
DW Dreysse, Les cités d’Ernst May, Dieter Fricke GmbH 1988
Erich Fromm, The art of loving, George Allen & Unwin 1957
Martin Heidegger, Habiter en poète and Être et temps, 1927
Jacques Neirynck, Le huitième jour de la Création, PPUR 1986
Christian Norberg-Schultz, L’art du lieu
Thierry Paquot, L’utopie ou l’idéal piégé, Hatier 1996 and Vive la ville!, Panoramiques-Corlet 1994
Guy Rottier, A different life style, Action Française d’action artistique 1999
Jacques Rougerie, Les enfants du capitaine Nemo
Georg Simmel, La tragédie de la culture
D’Arcy Thompson, On Growth and Form, Cambridge University Press 1961
Pierre Von Meiss, De la forme au lieu, PPUR
Sun, Jan 4, 2004
Vision Journal